A quick trip to the Aspyr Media Games Project Status Page will reveal that the long-awaited stealth shooter Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell, and the SimCity 4 Rush Hour expansion pack have just had their status updated to Golden Master, and are expected to ship around the end of the month.

Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell, the latest addition to the popular author's computer game franchise to hit the Mac, puts players in charge of Sam Fisher, the Splinter Cell, a super-secret rogue element of the military charged with ensuring that American freedoms are protected, while operating so far undercover that the US government will disavow any knowledge of Sam's existence if his missions are compromised. The highly-rated third person shooter features covert stealth-action gameplay, complete with such comprehensive stealth techniques as sniping, split jumping, zip lining, and using human shields during firefights. On the technical side, the title features revolutionary lighting, shadowing, animation and physics technology yet unseen in any Mac title.

The long-awaited game, whose Mac port was first announced by prolific Mac games publishers Aspyr Media over a year ago, is finally expected to ship before the end of the month. The title sports minimum requirements of a 867 MHz G4 or G5 processor equipped with at least a ATI Radeon or NVidia GeForce 2 card with 32MB of VRAM, running OS X 10.2 or later. Gamers anxious to get their hands on the title should head over to the IMG Store, where copies can be pre-ordered for $39.95 USD, or $35.95 for MacGames DVD subscribers.

Maxis fans will also be pleased to learn that the SimCity 4: Rush Hour expansion pack has also been declared Golden Master, and is on its way to A Store Shelf Near You.

The addition to the popular god-game allows players to take complete control of their city's transportation systems, be them on land, air, sea, or even interstellar travel. The expansion set, which adds unprecedented control over the sim metropolises, requires a 700MHZ G4 CPU or faster, 32MB of video RAM, OS X 10.2.8 or greater, and a full version of SimCity 4 to play.

The IMG Store is currently offering pre-orders of the new title for the low price of $29.95 USD ($26.95 for MGDVD subscribers), and can be attained through the links below. Make sure to order your copy today to be the first in your carpool to enjoy the title.

An article has been posted at Wired.com which contains information on a possible breakthrough piece of software emulation. Transistive Corporation claims to have developed a "universal emulator" that enables any hardware to run software designed for any platform. The article details a press release from the company. In this press release, the corporation claims that there is very little performance sacrifice, with as much as 80% of original performance being conserved.

Transitive Corporation, the leading provider of software that enables transportability of applications across multiple processor and operating system pairs, today launched its QuickTransit™ product line, a family of products that allows software applications compiled for one processor and operating system to run on another processor and operating system without any source code or binary changes.

The Wired article details a demonstration of the Linux version of Quake 3 Arena running on an Apple Powerbook. Apparently this is possible due to 3D Acceleration being part of the software.

In demonstrations to press and analysts, the company has shown a graphically demanding game -- a Linux version of Quake III -- running on an Apple PowerBook.

"One of the key breakthroughs is performance," Wiederhold said. "You can't tell the difference between a translated application and a native application."

Transistive Corporation claims to have signed up six PC manufacturers to distribute the software, all unnamed. The first will go public later this year, Transitive said.

The ramifications of a near perfect software emulator hitting the market are wide. If the software turns out to be as revolutionary as claimed, then it is certain that we have entered a whole new era of personal computing.

To find out more, read the full Wired article and Transistive Corporation press release at the links below.

Early Registration for IndieGamesCon '04, which is set to take place on October 8th till October 10th, ends this coming friday. IndieGamesCon is in it's third year of bringing Programmers, Artists and Indie entrepreneurs together under one roof. This year the line up includes, among other things; a keynote speech by GameHouse CEO Garr Godfrey, several presentations from industry leaders and a Saturday Night LAN Gaming event.

Indie Games Con (IGC) is a fun, informal and informative gathering of independent game developers from around the world. IGC is designed to be a summit meeting of like-minded developers with the shared goal to focus on collaboration and building community. This is an unprecedented opportunity to meet other indie developers, professional guest developers, hardware manufactures as well as the GarageGames staff. Join Us!